As many of you have noticed, a lot of blog posts about the new iOS 7 by Apple are growing during these days. Today, I want to share my thoughts about it, mainly as developer and less as a designer because I am not.

iOS 7 is the new operative system for iPhones, iPods and iPads that will be publicly released in fall ’13 and it represents a complete renovation. This was widely expected and requested because iOS is now 6 years old but it has rarely had big changes about its interface and design. Even thanks to competition, it felt a need for change which has arrived with this new major release.

iOS is famous thanks to skeuomorphism but now, its textures are replaced by brights gradients and colors, making that concept almost old. The new design is now dominated by big white spaces, or lighter ones, that some times communicates a sense of freedom, together with borders and colored words which now replace the role played by buttons in the previous versions. What is shown on the screen is now focused on the content and less attention is paid to controls like buttons, keyboards or slides.

Even if it looks very different, iOS 7 remains the same we have always used, with its gestures and the same familiarity. Indeed, now it seems to be more fluid and modern but with more clarity. Of course, there are many things made in a hurry, I think, but others are carefully crafted as Jony Ive always do.

I’m sure that this will be one of the iOS’ versions that will mostly change during its development and before being released to the world. I think it’s a too drastic change to a relation between an user and his device, especially after so many years.

The change that I’m referring to in this article, isn’t just about graphic but even about applications as we know them today. During next months, developers will face an important challenge to improve and renew their applications so that they will look better accordingly to iOS. Surely, this won’t be an easy step and the prize will be a kind of a new start on the App Store. It is as if everything would be restored, allowing developers to have a new chance to stand out from the crowd, as if they were publishing their application on the store for the first time.

There are more than 900K applications on the store, after all, and be able to catch that opportunity is like going back a few years, when their presence was less wide and it was easier to let know an application.

Finally, this is a clear indication of how Apple is changing and what path is going to follow in the next years. There are people who like it and others who don’t but, in my opinion, it is doing it well!